“I have to work.” She looks up at me with those big gray eyes and I have to physically restrain myself from doing something stupid, like tucking a strand of her hair behind her ear.
“After, then. I’ll send a car. Bring clothes and your toothbrush and shit.”
Long, black lashes fan the tops of her cheeks as she flutters her lids dramatically. “How romantic.”
“I told you—”
“Romance is for fairy tales and teenagers. Don’t worry, I remember.” She salutes me, then spins on her Target flats. “Bye P-Three.”
I watch her hips sway as she walks away. My mother comes up beside me and snorts. “What?”
“Nothing.” She shrugs innocently. “I mean, I’d like grandchildren before…well. You know.”
I smile sadly, then hook an arm around her shoulder. I do know, but today is a good day, so I’m determined to forget all about business, deteriorating brain function, and the girl who smells like coconuts and the C-train, so I can enjoy dinner with my mom.
The bell above the door to Carlo’s Pizzeria chimes as Jalen, my mother, and I walk in. Carlo’s is one of those back-alley, hole-in-the-wall joints that, from the outside, looks like the kind of place that serves a side of E. coli with every pie.
Anthony Bourdain tried to film an episode of his Travel Channel show here once, and Carlo told him to shove those cameras up his ass. Despite how amazing the food is, there is never a wait. I’m not even sure how he affords to keep the lights on.
“Gwen, bella!” Carlo says hobbling around the counter. His son, Carlo Jr., smiles from the kitchen, as the old man wraps my mother in a tight hug. “You don’t come around anymore.”
“I know, I’ve been…” Her voice trails off. “I’ll do better.” It’s hard to remember that my mother had an entire life before marrying Satan. She was born on Long Island, the only child to a single parent who worked twelve-hour days at a hair salon just to afford necessities. My grandma died when I was a baby, but I’d always felt connected to her. I’d like to say it’s because my mother kept her memory alive, but in reality, I bonded with my dead grandma over a mutual hate for my father.
I was thirteen when I first discovered my father was a philandering bastard. I ran to Graham—this was before I realized he was nothing but an enabling snake—and he told me that my parents loved each other, but sometimes men make mistakes. As proof of said love, he emailed me a copy of their wedding video. What I didn’t expect was to watch my grandma, a fiery little woman with an unnatural shade of red hair, stand, and in the thickest New York accent, ask my mom if she was really, really sure she wanted to marry that pompous ass in front of God and the rest of New York’s high society.
My mom just smiled her sunshine in the middle of a hurricane smile and said, of course, Mama, he’s the love of my life. I think that was the message Graham had been trying to send, but the only thing I took from it was an intense and immediate love of Maryanne Figueroa.
We place our order, then plop down at a sticky table near the jukebox. Jalen slaps a few quarters on the red and white plastic covering and my mom beams at him. She snags the change and bounces over to the old machine. Etta James fills the silence, followed by my tone-deaf mother belting out the opening lines of Misty Blue.
We watch her, long hair flowing down her back, smile lines wrinkle the sides of her eyes, and though we just celebrated her fifty-fourth birthday, you’d never know it by looking at her. She seems young and so carefree. It isn’t fair. Nothing about this is fair. Not the disease, nor the bouts of depression that come with it.
“Hey,” Jay says as if sensing the shift in my mood. “She’s happy. Let’s eat this greasy shit and let her be happy.”
I nod and return my attention to my mother. She stumbles through the second verse but doesn’t let it deter her. Once the song ends, and she hits a few buttons on the jukebox, Etta’s voice fills the silence again as she finally makes her way to the table. “I love this song.”
“We know,” Jay and I groan in unison.
Misty Blue is track one on the playlist of our youth. Our mothers would sit in the parlor of our big house upstate with overpoured glasses of chardonnay and sing and laugh for hours. I grin, picturing Ellie and Erin in their little apartment doing the same, only instead of wine and Etta James, it’s with cans of Coors Light and Beyoncé. Slipping my phone from my pocket, I notice another three missed calls from my dad, which I ignore to text Ellie to remind her to pack something she can wear to work.
“You’re obsessed with her, bro,” Jalen says peering down at my phone.
“And you’re a nosey bastard.”
“Who? That cute little girl from your office?” My mother’s ears perk up. She’s been on mission, give me a grandbaby, since I finished grad school.
“She isn’t cute, or little or a girl.” I sound like a whiney little bitch but whatever. Ellie is a grown-ass woman who sucks dick like a porn star and fucks like one too.
“You’re only saying that because you’re obsessed with her,” Jalen laughs. Carlo Jr. brings our drinks and tells us our pizza will be up in a few minutes.
The song changes, another slow blues record, and I shake my head. “I’m not obsessed. I just don’t like when other guys look at her, talk to her, or stand too close. At most, I’m possessive. Because I’m the only child of an emotionally unavailable father, I’d say it’s to be expected.” I direct that one to my mom, who cackles, which is interesting considering she’s usually the first to defend him.
“Why can’t you just admit that you like her?” I’m going to kill Jalen. Who needs friends anyway? Especially when they are tattletale bastards who can’t keep secrets.
“It’s not that I can’t admit it. I do like Ellie, and maybe if she didn’t work for me and maybe if I didn’t have Graham breathing down my fucking neck, then I’d have time to work through my daddy issues and do the right thing—but she does, he is, and I don’t, so I’m going to continue to fuck her until I get bored.”
“Maxwell!” Mom admonishes.
“Sorry, Mom. We’re having consensual intercourse on a semi-regular basis, until such time we mutually agree to part ways…amicably.”
She looks up to the popcorn ceiling and sighs. “You couldn’t have given me a girl, could you?”
The bell to the door chimes and we turn in time to see my father storm in, in all his demonic glory. He’s scowling, and I’m sure it has something to do with me not answering his seven million phone calls, but as far as I’m concerned, he’s dead.
“Where the fuck have you been? And why the fuck didn’t you take your phone or your fucking driver with you?” He holds up my mother’s iPhone as exhibit A. Jalen and I stand at the same time, wedging ourselves between my parents.
“I don’t know what crawled up your ass, old man, but never speak to my mother like that again.”
“It’s fine, boys.” Her voice is tired, broken. I turn to see tears welling in her big brown eyes.
“Gwen?” My dad shoulders between Jalen and me and drops onto the chair next to my mother. “Baby, what’s going on? Talk to me, please. You used to talk to me.” More tears fall, and it’s as if I’m suspended in the air, watching my dad, one of the most powerful men in New York, beg.
“I’m leaving.” Her voice is still tired, but there’s determination there too.
“What?” Shock is written on the lines of Preston’s face. It’s an emotion I’d never seen him wear. It’s one that disconnects something from my chest.
Jay and I exchange a look. “Mom?”
“That’s why I wanted to have dinner with you boys. I’m going to Chicago for a little while. Jalen, your mom found a doctor who specializes in early onset degenerative brain disease and I figured, what do I have to lose?”
“When?” I ask.
She looks each one of us in the eyes, then says, “Tonight.”
“You weren’t going to tell me?” My dad chokes—he fucking chokes on his words. Fast-talking New York f
inance king, rendered to a sniveling, groveling shell because the one woman he could never quite figure out how to love was done waiting for him to get it right. “You were just going to leave?”
“I thought you’d be happy to be rid of me. Then you can fuck all the twenty-year-old interns in the tri-state.”
My father’s face falls and his grip on her tightens. “I don’t want to fuck anyone but you.” The unspoken implication is clear…he can’t help himself. He cheats over and over again. He hurts her, over and fucking over again, because of some ridiculous boys will be boys bullshit and my mother is just supposed to accept that’s the way he’s wired.
It makes me sick. I move to intervene, but Carlo Sr.’s withered hand on my shoulder halts the motion. “Let him talk to his woman, son.”
“Don’t fucking lie to me, P,” my mother says, and the determination is fiercer than it was before.
“I’m not lying.”
She grabs her phone from the spot on the table where my father dropped it and turns the screen to him. It’s a picture of my dad and a woman who is not my mother, with his dick in her mouth. “Try again. And don’t tell me it’s from before, because that’s the watch I gave you for our anniversary. The one I had inscribed with the words you said to me at the doctor’s office that day.”
“It’s still true for me. I know I fuck up a lot, but I haven’t given up on us. I love you more than I ever have.” My father drops to his knees. One thing to note about my dad is that he thinks he’s better than ninety-nine percent of the population. I doubt he kneeled before my mother when he presented her with a ring and a mouth full of empty promises. Seeing it now breaks me in a different kind of way.
“You have given up.” She shoves the phone in his chest.
He shakes his head. “It’s hard watching you struggle. I don’t handle it well, and I know I don’t deserve you, but there is nothing on this planet that I love more than you.”
“Save it. Just save it. I’ve heard it all before, and you continue to hurt me. I used to think it was because of this.” She points to her brain. “But now I know it isn’t me at all. It’s you. You’ve had the world handed to you, and yet, you’re still the same self-destructive boy I fell in love with. I tried to fix you and somehow ended up broken in the process.”
“Gwen—”
“I’m done,” she cuts him off. “I don’t want my last memories to be painful ones.”
“Don’t do this.” He shakes her shoulders and I’ve had enough.
“Just go,” I growl, glaring down at my father as he kneels in layers of grease. He doesn’t seem so scary from this angle. “Just leave.”
He looks back to my mother, presses a kiss on her knee, then leaves without another word. The bell echoes for what feels like hours after he’s gone. It’s my mother’s sad voice that breaks the trance. “I saw it coming, this end. I expected it. I planned for it. And even with all that clarity, this still hurts.”
“Somebody’s getting dick tonight,” Erin sings as we change into our uniforms.
“Shut up,” I grit, whipping my button-down shirt at her head. It falls to the ground near our feet.
“What?” She gives me an innocent look. “It’s true.” We pull on our black Woody’s tanks and shimmy the tiny shorts over our hips.
“But that doesn’t mean you need to broadcast it to the world.” I glance over my shoulder to Luca, Erin’s sometimes boyfriend. Woody’s only has one locker room since the men’s side was flooded last month. Woody, the cheap bastard that he is, hasn’t bothered fixing it yet. According to him, there isn’t enough staff to justify two changing rooms, and if anyone is uncomfortable, they can change in the restrooms. Gotta love the people of New York.
“Don’t worry, El.” Luca saunters over and wraps Erin into his arms. “You aren’t the only Chase girl who’s getting dicked tonight.” His soft green-eyed gaze drops to my sister.
Erin rolls her eyes and pushes him away from her. Luca, though handsome in a frat boy kind of way with his blond hair and green eyes, isn’t Erin’s type. She likes assholes, and he’s too nice. We all started at Woody’s around the same time. Erin was in a dark place after everything went down at the restaurant where she used to work. Luca was obsessed with my sister, and he eventually wore her down. He’s basically a rebound that stuck. Now, they’re in this odd place in their relationship; he wants to move forward, she doesn’t, yet she can’t seem to let him go.
It’s basically a shit show—not that I have room to talk. I have a sex contract with a man who refers to me as Piss Girl and fucks me like he hates me. But that’s life, right? A beautiful and tragic mess. No one said it was easy, but if we’re lucky, we get it right on occasion. I’m holding out hope that this thing with Max is me getting it right. And if not, I’m holding out hope that I’m strong enough to weather the storm.
After we’re dressed, we head out to the main room. Four of our regulars sit at the bar, while a few college-aged guys play pool in the back. Luca gets to work restocking the beer cooler while Erin and I get the rundown from Nola, Woody’s daughter and the night manager.
The first hour crawls by. There isn’t a game on tonight and it’s a weekday. Translation—
no tips for Ellie and Erin. The silver lining is that I managed to get my side work done, and unless there’s a surprise rush we should be out of here on time.
“Jameson, straight,” a deep voice says to my left. I look to see a man with tattoos on his knuckles and teeth so white they blind me.
Smiling, I say, “Coming right up,” and pull the bottle from the shelf and pour his drink, before placing it in front of him.
“Thanks, Ellie,” he says, his eyes glued to my name tag, aka my breasts. I’m about to call him on it when I remember this is the first new customer I’ve had since my shift began, and any tips are better than no tips.
“That’s no fair.” I pout. “You know my name, but I don’t know yours.”
“Trent,” he grunts, swallowing down his drink in two big gulps. His Adam’s apple bobs up and down (it’s not as hot as Max’s, but Adam’s apple porn is Adam’s apple porn), and he slams the glass onto the wood.
“Another?” I raise the bottle in question. There’s something about him, something I can’t quite put my finger on. Working in bars forces you to learn how to read people. Typically, my instincts are spot on, but lately, due to a certain Wall Street wolf with incredible hair, my bullshit detector is on the fritz.
“Please, and if we could watch something other than SportsCenter, I’ll double your tip.”
That’s what I’m talking about. I flash him every tooth in my head as I pour the shot, then grab the remote and hand it over. “You know, if sports aren’t your thing, maybe next time don’t go to a sports bar.” My nose scrunches as I try and fail to suppress my laugh.
He shakes his head, his dark hair—long on the top and shaved on the sides—falls into his eyes. Eyes that take their time sliding down my body. “Maybe I didn’t come for the sports.”
I open my mouth to flirt back, when a familiar scowl catches my attention. Max leans on the counter, and fire drips from every pore in his body—a body dipped in denim and wrapped in a soft t-shirt, while still, somehow reeking of wealth and overall, I’m better than you-ness. He turns his head to Tattoo Trent and sneers. “A little out of your league don’t you think?”
Trent lifts his glass, unfazed. “Maybe that’s for her to decide.”
Max chuckles, the sound dark, ominous. Reaching into his pocket, he pulls out the panties he stole from me earlier, bringing them to his nose and inhaling, just before tossing them next to Trent’s drink. “She already decided, douchebag.” He pins me with a glare, then saunters to the back. I don’t even think twice. I just grab my panties and make a hasty apology before telling Erin I’m taking fifteen. P-Three is in the building and he is pissed. Too bad he isn’t the only one.
I slam the door to the locker room shut behind me so hard the lockers rattle. “The fir
st rule of fuck club is that you aren’t supposed to be here,” I yell, waving my underwear around like a madwoman. I’m seconds away from going full on Oakland girl, army brat on his privileged ass.
“And you aren’t supposed to be flirting. It looks like we both broke the rules.” His eyes are dark. In the span of a few hours, it seems like he reverted back to the old Max, the one who treated me like I was scum on the bottom of his shoe. He dips a hand into the pocket of his jeans and pulls out a wad of twenties and tosses one at my feet. “Strip.”
“I don’t have time for this.” I shake my head. So much for getting it right. Max is, was, and will always be Max. That’s one of the reasons I’m so attracted to him. It’s also one of the reasons why I will probably kill him. I should hedge my bets and end it now. I’m not built for prison. Hell, I’m barely built for New York.
“I thought you flirt with guys who tip?” He peels off another twenty and it lands next to the other one.
Don’t stab him, Ellie. Do not stab him. I sigh and jab my finger in his chest since it won’t result in jailtime. “I thought you were having dinner with your mother?”
“Yeah, well, she had a flight to catch.” Hurt flashes in his eyes, but he quickly covers it with indifference. “
“What was that?” I rear back in shock. Did he just show an emotion other than anger?
“Nothing.” He clears his throat and adds another twenty to the pile.
I step over the money and we stand, chest to chest. “The second rule of fuck club is no lying.”
“I thought the second rule was—”
“Never mind the second rule,” I cut him off. “Tell me why you’re here, or I’ll be sleeping in my apartment tonight.”
He grunts. His big hands grip my hips, the rough, dirty money creating a physical barrier to match the emotional one. “I told you. My balls are in need of attention.” He pulls me forward, resting his forehead against mine. Shallow breaths and pounding hearts fill the air surrounding us. Our needy anger and lust grows thicker with each inhale and exhale.
Pretty Little Mess Page 10